


gold light shining on so many things

by sodiumflare



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Elektra could kick all their asses, F/F, F/M, Foggy is a good avocado, Gender or Sex Swap, always a girl matt murdock, give me genderbend or give me death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-31
Updated: 2015-08-31
Packaged: 2018-04-18 05:19:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4693553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sodiumflare/pseuds/sodiumflare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was an open chair across from him. She was clearly a badass. He pitched his voice low, figuring it would carry better in the cafeteria uproar, and said, "Hey - sit here?"</p><p> </p><p>Because lesbian genderswap is always the answer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Foggy Nelson met Magdalena Murdock on the second day of freshman year, in Dulaney, when some guy said something to her; Foggy didn't hear it, and never thought to ask, but clearly _she_ heard it, because Magda had turned on her heel to face him, face inscrutable behind her glasses, and said loudly, "Hey, asshole, your fly's down."

The guy's hand automatically went to his crotch before he realized he was taking grooming advice from a blind girl and blushed scarlet. Students around him laughed, the girl smirked, and Foggy realized that she was juggling a lunch tray and a cane, and probably needed somewhere to sit and eat.

There was an open chair across from him. She was clearly a badass. He pitched his voice low, figuring it would carry better in the uproar, and said, "Hey - sit here?"

She did. The rest was history.

\--

They move in together like this:

They don’t become roommates until a week into the second semester; Mags’s roommate is some queen bitch named Emily, who leaves shit on the floor and douses herself in perfume on a semi-hourly basis. Mags petitions Columbia to be allowed to move, and Emily helpfully refuses to have any part in the mandated reconciliation bullshit that LaDonna, their RA, has to put them through, and then Foggy’s roommate moves into his frat’s house in January, and Mags sweetly threatens a lawsuit if the school doesn’t let her move, and suddenly the stars align and LaDonna even loans Foggy her station wagon so it only takes, like, one trip to haul Mags’s stuff across campus. Mags doesn’t have a lot of stuff.

\--

Living with a girl is less weird than Foggy had secretly worried it would be: he doesn’t have sisters, but he does have nieces and cousins, and he’s never been the kind to throw a fit over a box of tampons on the bathroom counter anyway. Mags is pretty into yoga pants and flannel – he loses a couple pairs of sweatpants to her one week in January when the school HVAC system throws in the towel in the middle of a cold snap. Frank, certified fratbro and Foggy’s ex-roommate, asks later that semester, leering theatrically, if Foggy likes being able to ogle his new roomie, and Foggy responds, mostly honestly, that he saw more of Frank’s bodacious bod than he’s ever seen of Mags’s.

Frank pauses, grins, and shrugs it off. Frank’s not a bad guy, really.

\--

The thing about Magda is that she is very careful not to need – not things, and not people.

He supposes the maybe part of it’s the blindness, that there’s probably less impulse to accumulate shit when you can’t _see_ it, but the fact remains that Magda makes a Buddhist monk look like a hoarder. She has a file box with her important documents, a couple Braille books (which are the size of fucking _phone books_ , and the fact that a central plot point in _The Book of Eli_ was incredibly, crucially _wrong_ wounds him more than he’ll ever admit to), and a small and monochromatic wardrobe sorted by texture (“How am I supposed to know if something matches?” she says when he asks, and when he suggests that he could help, she just laughs in his face and asks if his socks match. She has a point), and not a hell of a lot else. Her hair is short – she gets it cut in a barber shop in Hell’s Kitchen, where she’s gone since she was a kid – and she doesn’t wear makeup, or jewelry, or heels.

It’s one of the reasons he doesn’t steal his sweatpants back.

She’ll take Foggy’s arm if they’re walking across campus, but seems utterly unafraid to run to the convenience store when it’s two in the morning and she really wants a Lunchable (“Foggy,” she says patiently, “it’s _night_. How is seeing going to help you?”). He tries to stick close to her at parties, because he’s he knows that dudes at parties are scum and also, _blind girl_ , and he keeps an eye on her drink because she _can’t_ , but she seems to have a knack for drifting away from the ickier elements as the crowd shifts around the room. “Like the opposite of those things with the sharks,” he tries to explain once, drunk, and the fact that she’s the one hauling his trashed ass across campus is yet another piece of proof that she doesn’t need anybody’s help. Sometimes Magda drifts away when he’s not paying attention, but she always finds her way back.

Which is why it’s a surprise when he wakes up one morning and and finds her curled cross-legged in her office chair, chin in her hands and apparently waiting for him to rejoin the world of the living.

“Foggy,” she says.

“…do I have something in my teeth?”

“You’re funny.”

“I wish I was. What’s up?”

She tucks her chin. “I want to get my ears pierced.”

“…Please tell me you don’t want to _Parent Trap_ this.”

Laughter barks out of her chest, startling both of them, and she grins. “Nah. Just come with me.”

He’s really hoping that she’ll want to get them done at Claire’s, even though it’s a terrible place for piercings and he would be honor-bound to talk her out of it, because the image of Magdalena Murdock, (future) Attorney at Law, clad all in black and gray and perched on one of those stupid little stools like a vulture, surrounded by racks of gaudy rhinestone jewelry and feather boas and Hello Kitty shit, is entirely _perfect_.

But she says she knows a guy from Con Law who knows a guy who runs a parlor over on 54th, one of those places with yearlong waiting lists, and slyly suggests that Foggy could get a tribal armband at the same time.

“You’re hilarious, Murdock,” he says (“You could get one of those Chinese characters and tell everyone that it means courage or something, when it really says ‘I heart dim sum,’ Foggy!”) and later that week, he finds himself awkwardly wedged between a fearsome mahogany cabinet the size of a delivery van and a spidery ficus. The guy with the needle looks like he’d dump Foggy in the East River if he knocks a leaf off. Foggy does his best to make himself very small. He’s not really successful.

The guy has Mags lie own, and makes a dot with a ballpoint pen. He asks her if she wants to look with a mirror to approve them. Mags snorts, and then calls Foggy over (and makes one last, valiant push for him to get a tramp stamp).

The dots look – about like where earrings go. “They look good, I guess,” he says, and doesn’t even faint when the guy slides the needle through. Mostly because he’d’ve taken out the ficus on the way down. The guys gives Mags a little bag with some soap and salt when they leave, and on the way home, they detour over a few subway stops to Foggy’s uncle’s place for some life-affirming corned beef, where his Aunt Beth berates Foggy for looking peaky (like it’s _his_ fault, jeeze) and compliments Magda on the tiny silver studs. Magda blushes and ducks her head further into her sandwich.

Later, after Easter, he’s not at all surprised when Beth tucks a small package with _Magdalena_ scrawled on the paper in his hand while he’s trying to find his hat and shrug into his sweatshirt and not accidentally sideswipe any of his cousins. When Magda opens it, she traces her fingers over the delicate studs. “Foggy,” she says, voice a little wobbly, “What are they?”

The posts are silver, and the heads are garnets, less than the diameter of a pencil eraser, in a silver setting. He tells her as much, and she bites her lip, closing her fingers over the cardboard.

When he catches them glinting through her hair the next day, he doesn’t say anything, but he does text Aunt Beth.


	2. Chapter 2

Mags doesn’t really date, per se; he’s pretty sure she hooks up, although she doesn’t bring people back to their dorm. She had a thing with Amira from Macro, he’s pretty sure, and a redhead from Film Club. Sometimes she wanders off at parties and comes back looking flushed and conspiratorial. Good for her. Someone ought to, Foggy figures, and thinks mournfully of the hot blonde two rows ahead in Sociology of Poverty.

Which is why it’s a bit of a surprise when, one Saturday in October, he’s woken up, opened Facebook, and has already started his little five-cup coffee maker brewing when he realizes that Mags’s twin bed is operating over capacity: Mags is in it, and so is a tall woman with long, dark hair twined around Mags like a vine.

So that’s _new_.

His intention is to put some pants on, grab his stuff, and discreetly leave them to it, except that, as usual, his mouth is going before his brain is really onboard, and so instead what happens is that he simultaneously drops his coffee mug and says, “ _Holy shit_.”

Mags bolts awake like she’s been burned, while her friend seems remarkably unconcerned. Now that she’s sitting, he can see that he was right – she is tall, with a long, dark mane and the sort of nose that people call regal. Sharp eyes.

Whatever, she’s gorgeous, because Magda.

Foggy ignores the shards of coffee mug around his feet. “Hi, I’m – “

“ – _leaving_ ,” Magda says, so he does.

\--

Half an hour later, she finds him at their usual table in caf, playing Plants vs. Zombies on his phone and chasing the pieces of hashbrown around his plate, and being mostly unsuccessful at both – multitasking’s not really his thing, but whatever, it’s not like anyone’s keeping score. In her right hand, she’s holding a plate like a tray, with two mugs of coffee on it, while her left has her cane. She doesn’t need it so much right now; the caf is almost empty on weekend mornings, and the janitorial staff are pretty good about pushing chairs back in when they clean up for the night.

She puts the coffee down in front of him and then sits.

“If I ask you to gimme five, girlfriend, will you throw my coffee at me?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

They sit it in silence until the zombies take the house, and he gives up and starts a new game. “She seemed nice.”

Magda smiles. “She’s all right.”

“Also, she was super-hot.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

Foggy says, “I hate you,” and Magda grins, says, “That’s not really necessary.”

\--

Foggy surfaces groggily with the fuzzy knowledge that someone's pounding on the door.

"Foggy! Foggy! 'et door!"

Foggy verifies that he is, in fact, wearing boxers, and then pulls the door open. Magda sort of...swings in with it. She smells like a still, if he's being charitable.

"Uh... Mags?"

She seems to have lost her cane, but she knows the room, and when she throws herself onto her bed, she mostly hits it. There's sort of a bellyflop effect.

Mags doesn't usually get drunk. Not like this, and certainly not without him, because, among other issues, she does things like lose her canes.

Foggy tries again. "Magda?"

Facedown, she says something that sounds approximately like, "-mpked."

"Mpked - Mags, did you get _dumped_?"

"Don' wan' talk abou' it."

And that's the end of it. Foggy wrestles her shoes off her feet, and puts a glass of water on her nightstand with bottle of aspirin, and makes a mental note to be very, very quiet the next morning.

\--

At noon, he risks coming by with breakfast burritos from that place on fifth. He's never been there, and he's pretty sure Magda hasn't either, but she's said that it smells good, and that's a surefire good sign.

When he eases the door open, he finds Magda, wrapped in an oversize t-shirt and his second-favorite pair of sweatpants, sitting on the floor, back against the dresser and headphones in. She's been into some ASMR shit lately. Maybe there's a hangover one.

He approaches, with the burrito held before him like a peace offering. “You wanna talk about it?”

She doesn’t respond, but she does tug out her right earbud, which is kind of a general permission to continue.

“Was it the hot blonde from Stats?”

Mags rolls her eyes, looks a little like she regrets the movement, and after a brief recovery period says, “How would I know?” Her throat sounds _wrecked_.

“Psych! All the hot girls in Stats are blonde. Eat your burrito, beans will help.”

“She wasn’t from Stats.”

That leaves Foggy three more classes and extracurriculars to choose from. “Spanish?” The noise Mags makes, through a mouth full of delicious salsa goodness, is a distinct negative. She’s looking a little less like death, though. “Please tell me it wasn’t Marci.”

Mags’s laughs always sound like they’ve escaped, but this one sounds like a full-blown prison break of giggles. He kind of loves making her laugh. “ _God_ , no. You can keep mooning after her on your own.”

“Jealous?”

“Try relieved.”

Marci fascinates Foggy the way the velociraptors in _Jurassic Park_ fascinated him when he was a kid: a combined sense of awe, beauty, and the profound knowledge that she (or they) could really, _really_ fuck him up if she (or they) wanted to. Also, she’s scary-smart. Also, just scary. But also, hella smart.

\--

She’s kind of down in the dumps for a couple days, which figures. Mags doesn’t really eat ice cream, which is Foggy’s sisters’ go-to post-breakup food, but he buys a not-shitty bottle of wine and borrows a bunch of nail polish from Pritha down the hall, and when she gets back from Film Club and opens up her laptop, he spins to face her in her desk chair like some sort of evil space overlord, and says, “Do you _have_ to study tonight?”

He’s pretty sure she doesn’t. Her Fridays are pretty light this semester, and she has a fucking 3.9 or something anyway.

Mags pauses, eyes wide and surprised behind her glasses. “I – no?”

“Mags, you’ve been dumped, and there’s a process that goes with that. I have laid in the provisions. I am prepared for the ritual. Which is to say, I have wine, _Shakespeare in Love_ is on Netflix, and I am not opposed to painting your nails. My sisters say that it’s fun. I promise not to fuck it up too badly. Pritha says she’ll audit them so you don’t have to trust that they look okay.”

For a moment, he thinks she’s going to refuse. Then she closes her laptop again, and turns back toward him. “Tell me about this wine.”

By the end of the night, her fingernails are purple, the nails on his left hand are turquoise, they’re both moderately drunk – him more than her, as per usual, although there’s a flush in her cheeks he hasn’t seen in awhile; he’s not sure if it’s the wine or the easy, relaxed joy in her shoulders, or some combination of the two –they’ve both loudly agreed that sexism in Elizabethan theater is _bullshit_ , and Pritha has both approved of Foggy’s job as a manicurist and threatened to call campus security on them if they don’t shut the fuck up about Kit Marlowe.

They both pay for in the next morning, but whatever. You’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do.

\--

And then that’s it, and Foggy mostly forgets about it for a few months, until most of their AmerPolThought class is blowing off steam at a delightful hole in the wall after midterms; there’s a good chance their TA is trying to _kill them_ , and none of them have slept for a day or two, and Foggy’s coasting the wave of giddiness that he knows, based on regrettable experience, will turn into crushing exhaustion in an hour or two. So he’s enjoying it while it lasts.

He and Marci are arguing with Pritha and Daniel about whether the TAs can _actually_ be bribed, or murdered, or both, when he happens to look up and see Magda across the bar, with the tall, dark-haired woman he’d never expected to see again.

His curiosity gets the better of him, and dammit, Mags knows every detail of what they’ve decided to call his Trinity Davenport Disaster, and if she’s actually seeing someone – okay, not _seeing_ someone, dating them, whatever – he wants to know. So he abandons Marci, who’s so busy explaining to Pritha that she’s wrong, wrong, _wrong_ that she forgets to even yell at him for deserting her, and wanders over.

He’s not quite sure how to introduce himself, but Mags’s friend seems to be better at social niceties than either of them, and extends a hand. “I’m El.”

Her voice is pleasantly throaty, and accented, just a bit. He’d bet English isn’t her first language, although she’s obviously pretty fucking fluent. She looks ten times too regal to be sitting on a vinyl bar stool. She also looks like she knows it. He wonders if Magda can tell.

“Is that Elle, like ‘what, like it’s hard?’ or L, like some _Men in Black_ shit?”

It’s possible he’s had too much to drink to handle meeting people.

“It’s a nickname: E-L,” she says.

“Oh, like the train!” Foggy says.

It made more sense in his head. El raises one elegant eyebrow. Mags just looks like she wants to sink into the grimy wallpaper.

\--

When the bar kicks everyone out, he wanders away from El and Mags, while also trying to lag far enough behind Marci and Pritha that Marci won’t see him. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Mags lean up and place a kiss on El’s jaw, before turning back towards campus. He calls to her, and she adjusts her direction to catch up with him.

“She seems nice,” he says. It’s true: El does seem nice. Glaciers can be nice.

“She’s – she’s good,” Mags says.

“How long have you two been a thing?”

“Yeah, so,” Mags says.

“ _Spill_.”

“Um. We had broken up. I think we’re un-breaking up, now.”

Foggy stops dead in his tracks; Magda, who has a hand on his arm, nearly overbalances. “Mags, is she the one who _dumped_ you?”

She hauls him back into motion. “’Dump’ is a strong word.”

“Mags, getting back with someone who dumped you is a bad idea.”

“You’re one to talk.”

“Learn from my mistakes, grasshopper. Learn from the Trinity Davenport Disaster, and all of my clothes getting thrown out of a fifth-floor window. This is a dangerous road, and it ends in tears, and alcohol, and crying into your glass at Josie’s, which is probably the closest those glasses ever come to being washed.”

Mags smiles at him indulgently, which means that she’s going to do whatever the fuck she wants to do, but at least his protests have been lodged.

\--

And anyway, it’s somewhere around Christmas break that he and Marci become a _thing_ – some sort of noun, at any rate, although he doesn’t know what it is and Pritha mostly just looks at him pityingly from across the room in Health Policy in America – and Foggy really, really doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

But he’s always been better at looking out for people that aren’t himself, anyway.

\--

Eventually, he learns that they met at the gym – Mags goes a couple times a week; he doesn’t even wake up when she leaves anymore, but he knows Frank spots her when she lifts. El’s majoring in international business with a minor in something equally intimidating, and apparently her dad runs some sort of massive shipping conglomerate that basically controls anything moving in or out of the Mediterranean. She’s tall, and apparently also lifts – Foggy felt calluses when he shook her hand that night in the bar.

Mags spends more time with her, which is kind of how relationships work, or at least how relationships with people who aren’t Marci work. Earlier drama aside, they seem to get along together, and sometimes El comes over to pick up Mags, and hangs out for a few minutes while Mags finishes up homework. She and Foggy chat, a little bit: she’s gracious and personable, but Foggy quite shakes the feeling that she’s considering having him made into shoes.

El never seems to have homework, but according to Hiromi, who is Foggy’s eyes and ears in the dean’s office, she has a 4.0, which isn’t intimidating _at all_ , Foggy thinks, frantically trying to expand what is, if he’s really being honest, a fairly thin thesis into ten pages (not including endnotes or citations, because Dr. Rushman is an asshole who has it out for Foggy).

He wakes up one Saturday morning to find a black dress draped over the back of Mags’s office chair. He’s fairly sure he’s never seen the dress before – is fairly sure he’s never seen her in any dress before, and takes a quick survey of Mags’s bed to make sure she’s the only one in it (she is) before he starts properly waking up. On her nightstand, next to her phone and earplugs, is a pair of slim silver earrings. He’s never seen them before, either: they’re basically deconstructed hoops, with a hook that simply extends straight down from the ear lobe in a single delicate silver line. They look _sharp_. And expensive. Like El herself, basically.

So he makes coffee and eats dry cereal off an inverted Frisbee and fucks around on Homestar Runner. Mags stirs, eventually, and staggers into the bathroom – she’s generally a graceful person, but not in the morning – and waits until she’s properly fortified with a cup of coffee and a leftover cherry danish (Hiromi smuggles them from the dean’s conference room after staff meetings) to adopt what he hopes is a suitably nonchalant tone and says, “It’s a nice dress.”

Mags had just taken a swig of coffee, and the hand moving the cup away from her mouth stutters slightly. “Yeah.”

Foggy lets the silence stretch out between them, like a telegraph wire.

“I guess – “Magda says. “I guess you could say we’re getting serious.”


	3. Chapter 3

He doesn’t see Magda for a week after that – he hears from Frank that she’s coming into the gym with El now, so Foggy guesses that’s where she’s staying. He pulled El’s US address off some enrollment paperwork, having expertly bribed Hiromi with backstage passes to Fall Out Boy at Madison Square Garden that his grandma won off the radio. He looks up El’s house on Google Maps once; it’s hard to tell from street view, but he’s pretty sure there were peacocks on the lawn.

Mags still sits next to him in Principles of Macro, but doesn’t really talk to him. He’s rummaging for a pen one day when she reaches out and holds one in front of him. It feels vaguely like a peace offering, but on her extended arm, between her sleeve and her wrist, the skin is inky with bruises. It hits him like a wave.

“Mags, are you – “

She drops the pen on his desk and pulls her arm back next to herself, but flashes him a grin. “Foggy, if you don’t know what hickies look like…”

“Damn, skippy. You should see my face right now.”

\--

He finds her by the vending machines after class, where she’s holding a bag of beef jerky and looking perplexed. “Dang, did they move stuff around again?”

“Apparently.” She taps her cane on the ground irritatedly. “Well. Hell. That was my last dollar.”

Foggy fishes a bill out of his wallet. “What were you looking for?”

“The pistachios.”

Foggy swaps her the jerky for the pistachios. They chew in companionable silence, and he jostles her shoulder with his. “So. About El.”

Mags tenses, but doesn’t move away. He takes it as a tentative green light. “You know that I don’t like her – that she’s rich and charming and completely fucking sociopathic – but Mags, that doesn’t mean I don’t like _you_.”

She exhales harder than he’d’ve expected. Mags doesn’t do relationships, usually – she doesn’t have a lot of practice. It’s so easy to forget, with her grace and quick, quiet smiles, that when it comes down to it, human attachment is just not one of her strong points. “I’m not going to break up with her just because you want me to.”

“Well, no, and I wouldn’t expect as much. But, like – if she makes you into shoes or something, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“El isn’t going to make me into shoes, Foggy.”

“A lampshade, then.”

The hallway has cleared – classes have started again. They’re supposed to be in Con Law right now.

“Want a pistachio?”

Foggy taps her wrist to show her where is hand is, says, “Yeah, hit me.”

\--

It’s easier, after that – Magda starts splitting her time a little more evenly between El’s place and the dorm. Marci dials back some of her essential Marciness and they even have a couple nice dates.

By the glowing clock on Foggy’s nightstand, it’s a little past two in the morning when his phone starts ringing. Marci jolts awake faster than he does – “Hey, Foggy Bear, get your damn phone” – and the screen says its Mags. Mags, who doesn’t really call; Mags, who has never needed a damn thing in all the time he’s known her.

When he answers, El’s on the line. “Is this Foggy?”

“Yes – El – what?”

An indrawn breath. “We’re at the hospital. Magda’s hurt.”

When he hangs up, Marci’s already scrambling for her jeans. “I’ll drive.”

\--

(Marci specializes in throwing fits whenever she thinks Foggy might even be looking at another girl, but she has a weird jealousy-free zone around Mags, which is nuts, because Foggy fucking _lives_ with Mags, with bras and stolen sweatpants and occasional nakedness and everything. He asks Marci about it once, when he’s had too many shots not to know better, and she just smiles at him – it’s kind of her real smile, not the one that looks like it’ll grab your leg and hold it until you gnaw it off out of desperation and bleed out in the woods – and says, “But Foggy, you like her too much to be into her,” and it hurts, but it’s true, and that’s one of the things he’s just learned how to live with.)

\--

Marci drops him off – they have first hour together tomorrow, along with Mags, and Marci can tell Rushman why they’re not there (she takes a picture of Foggy scrambling out of the car outside the ER in case he demands proof. Rushman’s kind of an asshole).  

When Foggy finds them, Mags has been stabilized – apparently, whatever that means – and has a room to herself. There are some – tubes and wires, but all the vital stuff looks like it’s still attached. Her face is a mess, but at least she’s breathing on her own.

El is curled in a chair next to the bed like a cat, a styrafoam cup of coffee cooling in her hands. She unfolds when Foggy approaches, all long limbs and dark hair. She’s wearing black jeans and a dark red turtleneck. If the glued-together section along her cheekbone is any indication, the darker red patches on the turtleneck weren’t part of its original design. One wrist is in a brace. Not a cast. It could be worse.

“It was a car,” El says before Foggy can ask. “A driver ran the light as we were crossing. Magda was closer, and – “

Broken ribs, broken ankle. Damage to her hands, from where she tried to catch herself. Concussion. Extensive bruising of the everywhere. A nasty case of road rash.

“They say that she was lucky,” El says, voice a little throatier than usual. “It could have been much worse.”

\--

The combined skills of Marci, Hiromi, and a particularly cooperative nurse versus the inaptly-named office of student services get Mags a week excused from classes (“Only a _week_?” Foggy demands, incredulous, and Mags waves him down: “It’s not as bad as it looks, I’ll be back up in no time, and I’ll be _bored_.”). Mags quickly establishes herself as a terrible patient – she won’t take the horse-strength painkillers after the first few days, and although the usual noise level of the dorm is clearly driving her crazy, she won’t let El move her into a spare room where she could watch peacocks out the window.

Still, she heals faster than Foggy would have bet, equal parts boredom-induced angry naps, sheer cussedness, and El’s remarkably tender ministrations. El, Foggy learns, is actually a certified medical something back in Greece, and refuses to let Mags pull out her stitches herself (“My dear, it is not healed just because you _think_ it should be.”).

Foggy also learns that it was El’s skills that probably kept Mags from bleeding out while they waited from the ambulance. Between that, and the prepared meals she keeps bringing over for the three of them – sometimes four, when Marci’s around – Foggy slowly begins to revise his estimation of her upward.

Although the taste he’s developing for San Pellegrino seems ill-advised, given the level of debt he’s calculated to graduate with.

El even manages to finagle a taste for ice cream out of Mags, although it has to the really good stuff. Mags is apparently an ice cream snob.

\--

So it’s both a surprise and a blow when he comes back from class on a Friday and finds himself walking into what are clearly the simmering fumes of a recently-extinguished fight. Mags is sitting on the end of her bed, elbows and knees pulled in, while El rifles through their semi-shared drawer, tossing socks and bras into an open overnight bag. Is that a Vuitton bag? It kind of looks like a Vuitton bag.

You can get Vuitton _suitcases_?

“I, uh,” Foggy says.

“It’s nothing,” Mags snaps. “El’s just packing to _flee the country_.”

“We are _not_ –“

“Her family’s business is being investigated by the FTC,” Mags says.

Foggy knew that El’s family was, like, big – the peacocks were kind of a clue – but he didn’t know they were that…big.

“It is more complicated than that,” El bites from the bathroom, before emerging with her toothbrush. “And I am so sorry, but I – “

Mags’s cheeks are stained bright, and her nails are biting into her hands. “But what about – “

“I am sorry,” El says. “You will have to –“

Foggy quietly drops his backpack next to the door in the silence.

“I will come back,” El finally says. “Do you understand me? I will come back.”

“Yeah,” Mags says. Her whole body sags. “Yeah.”

When they kiss, Foggy knows she won’t.

\--

“You know – “ he begins.

“Yeah,” Mags says, “She’s not coming back.”

\--

After consultation with Marci – who had actually been pretty fond of El, in the way that Foggy imagines that sharks are fond of other sharks, and is visiting her family for the weekend - Foggy brings home wine, nail polish borrowed from Pritha, and a DVD of _300_.

The resultant hangovers are roughly proportional to the level of emotional involvement, Foggy figures. Which is to say, kind of a lot.

\--

Two weeks later, Mags still isn’t sleeping well. Marci is, unfortunately, unhelpful because Marci has never lost sleep over anything remotely resembling a feeling. Pritha won’t give him any more nail polish. Mags straight-up denies anything’s wrong, but Foggy lives with her: she’s awake when he goes to sleep, she’s at best sleeping fitfully when she wakes up, and you could sack groceries in the bags under her eyes.

“Nothing you can do,” Pritha says sympathetically. “Breakups are a bitch. Now give me back my topcoat.”

\--

A week after _that_ , and he jerks awake when their door opens. What time is it? Late.

“Shh,” Magda says from somewhere near the door. He can just see her face, limned in light from the hall.

“What’re – “

“I’m going out,” Mags says.

“Bu – wha - ?”

He can hear the smile. “Go back to sleep, Foggy.”

So he does.

\--

She’s better, the next day. Or calmer, at least.

And the day after that, and the day after that, until one day in the spring she catches him as he’s leaving lunch. “What do you have this afternoon?”

He doesn’t have class, but he might be getting together with Marci. Or something. He can never keep track of how their on-again, off-again works, which will probably result in her killing him in his sleep.

The garnet studs gleam in Magda’s ears. He hasn’t seen them in awhile.

“I’m free,” he says. “What’s up?”

She takes him out to a park on the Hudson – he’s never figured out how she knows where all this stuff is. Buys them ice creams from the fancy all-natural, organic ice cream from a cart. The woman selling it asks if they want to know the names of the cows the milk is from. Foggy can’t tell if she’s joking. New York’s gotten weird.

They walk out to the water: the breeze is picking up. Mags inhales deep; Foggy’s fingers are stick with ice cream. She roots in her pockets, pulls out a repurposed envelope. Tips those long, sharp earrings into her hand.

“I’m facing the water, right?” she asks, grinning.

She is.

She winds up and then pitches them out over the river. Foggy can just barely track them – silver and glinting and heavier than he’d thought, as they arc out into the water. Then they’re gone.

“Huh,” he says.

“Sometimes the theatrical catharsis works,” she says. “Want another ice cream?”

“Always,” Foggy says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So as may be obvious, I don't know anything about New York. I've sprinted through JFK once or twice. Um. Sorry.
> 
> It was hard, in this, to drop hints about what Mags was actually getting up to without Foggy knowing while still respecting his intelligence. Thus: Mags and El were not having your typical dates, unless typical dates involve, like, sparring a lot and also fighting crime; the “But what about – " was the kid whose abusive father Matt canonically beat the shit out of in college, which Mags was left to handle on her own when El fled; and while Mags and El were hit by a car, it wasn't quite a random hit and run. 
> 
> Title from The Mountain Goats' "Age of Kings."


End file.
